The Recruitment Industry Conference – summary

This blog post is rather late in arriving as I wrote it for another site who wished to run it first!  Better late than never though.

In November we hosted The Recruitment Industry Conference. It’s our showcase event (and we only charge £40 a ticket!). We had a really great turnout and people really struggled to choose between the two streams running through the day. There were actually 12 sessions and lots of them can be viewed on the UK Recruiter youtube channel. However, these are some of the key message from four of our speakers:

Kevin Green – Chair of the REC
a) The market is maturing if you want to thrive you have to be different
The market is growing slowly and we have lost over a thousand (11%) of recruiters in the last year. If you want to grow your recruitment business at a faster rate than the market predicted to be 2% this year you have to take sales from someone else.
b) To independent agencies focus on being an inch wide and a mile deep……be experts in your specialist market, have world class content to attract clients and candidates of the future
c) The future is bright for those that want to innovate

Mike Ellingham – founder and Director of MESO Marketing
d) Marketing is not just about Social Media. He presented a three step Marketing Model for recruitment businesses which covered Insight, Planning and Delivery.
e) Agencies need to get specialised in order to thrive in the future – Mike showed how he helps Recruiters to identify what skills and sectors will be in demand in the future and how to use Customer feedback to identify and build on key strengths.
f) Agencies should use the information they have easily to hand – e.g. analysis of latest salaries being offered by clients, trends in specific skills required and case studies of successful campaigns – and share it with clients to demonstrate capability and build credibility/thought leadership.

Mike Taylor from Web Based Recruitment and Daniel Richard from Sonru
g) There was a lack of support for Video CVs from the Recruiters in the room as they felt it would be too time consuming to review every Video CV that came through, although they did feel they could work for some roles (e.g. creative industry).
h) As for the use of video marketing to help promote a recruitment business (and their job vacancies) only one Recruiter in the room had used video marketing and they had seen good results from doing so. The use of video in the future will only grow and those Recruiters who start to use video now will certainly gain a competitive advantage.

Marc Cohen – Founding Director of ConSol Partners
i) Consider reducing investment in ‘traditional’ markets that are not bringing significant return. We need to look at future markets in our sector and by anticipating these can be part of their growth.
j) Leverage your existing success in your business – generate more competition through competitors, partners, international, networking

What was especially good about the day was the level of debate, discussion and engagement in the rooms – recruiters happy to talk about their own experiences and learn from their peers!

I thought I might also take the opportunity to do a bit of trumpet blowing (mostly on behalf of the speakers!) and share some feedback from the event:

“I thought the event was really good, I liked the venue, I took something away from most of the presentations I attended, I liked that some of the presentations were interactive as it meant that you got to throw ideas around with others and it sparked some interesting debates, it was great to meet so many people and the content of a lot of the presentations was very relevant to the work I’m currently doing.”

“Very well organised, highly relevant content. Only challenge was choosing which presentation to attend when there was a choice between 2! Would love to attend again next year.”

If you want to see some of the photos they are on our Facebook page.

We’re just working on our events schedule for 2013 – but will certainly be running the conference again next winter!